Apparently someone recently asked Andy Priestner
(UXLibs Conference Chair) what 'the next fad in libraries will be after UX'! To me
this totally miscasts what User Experience in libraries is all about. Purely
and simply, UX is an umbrella term for a suite of methods to help us
understand our uses better, and design changes to that service so it
works more successfully for those users. That is not a new or faddish
need. It isn't going to go away. The methods may be new to
libraries (in the UK at least; they're more established in the US and
Scandinavia particularly) but there is a growing community of libraries
and librarians getting amazing understanding and insight with them, so
we'll continue to use them. More and more info pro jobs are starting to
get elements of UX in the job description. This stuff is here to stay
not because it is fashionable, but because it works.

The
posts over the next two or three weeks will cover three projects
undertaken at the University of York, including guest posts from UX
Interns we had for two of them. The first covered Postgraduate students,
the second covered specifically just Postgraduate Researchers, and the
third, still ongoing at the time of writing, focused on academics. All
of them have been fascinating and rewarding, but by no means plain
sailing...

Most of our UX planning takes place here, in the Fairhurst building that forms part of the Library

UX at York: project overviews

We'll go into more detail in subsequent posts but here's an introduction to each project.

Project 1: Summer UX.
This was a 2 month project with the aim of building a UX Toolkit -
essentially understanding the UX techniques and methodologies in a York
context, see how they worked, what we could learn etc. We had an intern
working part-time during the 2 months, and we used 5 ethnographic
techniques across a total of 25 participants. These were all
Postgraduates, both PGRs and PGTs, from a mix of disciplines.

Project 2: PGR-UX. The
second project also featured an intern, and was more focused - we spoke
to fewer people, and the participants were all Research PGs. We
targeted people from specific departments, and really only used three of
the ethnographic techniques.

Project 3: Understanding Academics. This
project is absolutely huge and still on-going. It involves everyone in
Academic Liaison, will last several months, and involves academics from
every single Department at York. We have spoken to around 100 people in
total for this, and used two ethnographic techniques. The analysis has
just started.

Embedding ethnography

The
key to our approach at York has been to try and integrate ethnography
into our regular routine right from the start, rather than having a
little UX silo where UX projects happen in isolation. We now try and
utilise UX wherever appropriate in the Library, although quite honestly
we've been better at embedding the ethnography than we have at the
design-thinking / human-centred design aspect that completes (or
continues) the UX-cycle, but that side of things is coming. We aim to
consistently supplement our existing data collection methods with a
nuanced UX approach, and because of the amount of work involved in
ethnography and the sheer amount of time it takes, we target specific
groups and areas we want to know more about and use ethnographic
techniques with them. Each time we do, we learn more about that group of
users then we've ever known about a group of users before. It's
fantastic.

The five of us who attended the first UXLibs conference in 2015 set ourselves up as
available to be brought in on any wider projects happening in the
library, to provide advice and guidance of if, where and how ethnography
might be useful. So although the first project listed above, Summer UX,
was primarily a way to try out UX in a York context, the subsequent two
have been existing projects which have been deemed suitable for
ethnographic input, and we've been brought in to advise on how best to
go about it.

Our first
ever UX Intern, Emma Grey, has written about her experiences working
with us when completely new to both libraries and User Experience, and
the five ethnographic techniques she employed, including how she refined
them as she went along. That forms the next post on the blog: read Emma's article here.

Header pic by the Library Photographer at the University of York, Paul Shields. Used with permission.